For at least the past year and a half, I’ve been thinking hard about the relationship between political incivility and digital communication networks. (That’s partly what led me into the collaborative journal special issue on trolling). It’s hard to wade into this area without taking one of a few fairly predictable normative positions – where, as Susan Herbst points out, “things are worse” or “they have ever been thus and stop whining” are no less common for being practically unverifiable.
Ungrounded reflection tends to lead most quickly in these normative directions. I knew I had to talk to people, and what’s more I wanted to. At first I was drawn to celebrity – Press Gallery journalists and federal politicians. But then I worked out that people in those positions are actually partly sheltered from the most dramatic effects of the changes that have occurred in political communication concurrently with the mass uptake of Internet technologies and, more recently, social media.
So I wound up doing some “deep hanging out” with a selection of the hardest-working people in political communication – the people who moderate news websites and the people who answer phones, emails and run social media accounts on behalf of politicians. I have recorded many, many hours of conversations with these folks in the last few months that I’m still working through. The more complete version of my reflections will be in a book, the manuscript for which I’ve begun working on.
Yesterday, though, I had to produce an abstract for a conference I hope to attend next year. (I won’t name it here, because I am still under consideration). Consider this a snapshot of my thinking to this point on the whole topic. Something that gives some kind of flavour of what I’m now thinking about following those conversations. Any feedback would, as always, be welcome.
The Dark Side of Digital Political Communication? Agonism and Affect Sinks.
Twenty years after the first publication of Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Communities founded a certain strain of optimism in Internet studies, it is still common for scholars to hail each new generation of Internet technology, or even individual platforms, as the redeemers of a fallen democracy. More recently, a range of scholars have begun to listen more closely to the incivility which is the darker counterpoint of Internet history.
My research on online incivility reveals that while the Internet has revealed our politics as agonistic, our institutions are still geared to a predigital liberal constitutionalism that functionally depends on extensive, persistent areas of consensus, not least in procedural matters. Indeed, the consolidation of neoliberal governance has meant that the opposite to an accommodation of agonistic politics has occurred: many areas of politics and government have been depoliticised, and removed from the sphere of democratic scrutiny and dissension (e.g central banks’ conduct of monetary policy) (Hay, 2007). But the attempt to evacuate political conflict from areas of government does not make political passions go away (Chantal Mouffe has long argued that policy convergence and attempts at depoliticisation can instead give rise to populisms which react to the absence of debate on key issues by attacking the political system as a whole).
In these circumstances, front-line workers in our political institutions act as “affect sinks” for the political feelings which have been loosened by “communicative capitalism” (Dean 2009) but which struggle to find their destination. (The metaphor here refers to the heat sinks that allow electronic systems like computers to function) For now, these workers struggle to remove energy from the political communication system, and thus disproportionately bear the costs of agonistic politics. A more sustainable polity will have its institutions redesigned to accommodate the political conflict that we must learn to see not only as unavoidable, but as constitutive of democracy.
This paper is based on a study of those working at the friction points of digital political communication. Drawing on interviews with comment moderators on mainstream news websites, and others working as electorate officers or staffers for Members of Parliament, I show how political communications systems are approaching something of a structural crisis. Those working in public-facing roles struggle to deal with the large volumes of communication that digital technologies allow citizens and campaigning groups to send in contentious times. They also perform difficult emotional labour in dealing with the tone of some of the communication they receive, at a time when a weakening mass media has lost its capacity to moderate the tenor of political discourse. Keeping faith with the commitment these workers share to facilitating public communication means not advocating restrictions on people’s ability to comment. But I do suggest that restructuring the way in which we ask people to deal with public communication in these roles, as well as reframing public expectations, should be our most urgent priority in rebuilding sustainable democratic polities.
Wow, this sounds really awesome (and privately I might hit you up for a draft version of that paper if you wouldn’t mind me reading it). It’s exciting to me because a big part of my thesis is about using OOO to look at the same sort of situation you’re talking about here with front-line workers from a more oblique angle.
From a OOO perspective, “the government” as a whole exists (at least ontologically) as do the front line staff, however my interface with them both is totally asymmetrical in that I can go and scream some poor overworked Centrelink employee or a call center operator, but when I go looking for “the government” as such all I find are… humans. Or the occasional non-human like a policy document, or a brochure, etc, etc.
I’m doing an analysis of the PR/Journalist relationship from this angle because I think that big organisations themselves (and PR especially) totally use this to their advantage, by making it hard for the Journo to adopt a more critical, sceptical or even hostile attitude to the PR org because it’s wearing a human face! The reverse isn’t true though, because the PR rep is “just doing my job” and can be as corrupting an influence as their conscience allows.
Also I’ve just been reading heaps of ‘agonistic democracy’ stuff lately and everything your’ve said here sounds totally on point. Super rad stuff.
Fascinating topic, and I really like the term affect sinks to describe this role. It’s certainly one that needs to be discussed.
That said, I wonder how new it is? Two issues 1) Is there more communication 2) are there now different targets of this communication?
While I think the net has encouraged a greater volume of communication, I’m not sure the tone of it is significantly different. Instead I think it has simply become more visible through these public forums. Most people (pre-internet and now) express their political sentiments to their friends or loved ones. The tone might be slightly more civil , though the emotional weight partners of politically minded citizens bear is an unappreciated but hugely significant weight in any society (perhaps even more so in non-democratic societies where partners are the only people who one could legitimately complain about the government to without fear of persecution). It’s as much a role that sustains the mental health of a society (giving the aggrieved an outlet), as it is a role related to our polity. In some ways, the affect sink’s role helps share this burden families/colleagues/friends etc used to bear.
The question is then whether people now have a greater wish to express themselves, if this was related to the internet (ie is the net encouraging more of this type of communication, or due to other factors such as Moufee highlights with de-politicisation) or if we are simply seeing a transference from either internal thoughts and discussions with family,friends onto these third party ‘middle men’ who stand between or stand in for the desired target of the communication (ie a politician).
In terms of the burden these third parties now bear, it does make me wonder if, while emotionally heavy, our past is littered with physically heavy burdens for such people. Staffers of political leaders have often been the target of violence or persecution, either as a way to destabilise the politician, or retribution after their downfall. This of course mirrors the larger reduction of violence in our polity from pre-democratic eras, but is still notable.
Anyway, fascinating stuff, keen to discuss further and read the full paper once done.
This is shaping up to be a really interesting project. My only quibble is – and possibly this is something you’ll go into more detail in outside the confines of an abstract – that “civility” and “incivility” are both pretty historically and class-contingent terms, and it feels like they’re being treated as kind of universal here.
@Ben – As soon as it’s written I will send you a copy
So your project sounds really interesting too and there seem to be a lot of connections. I had no idea this was a focus of yours. I think the inability to find someone to talk to in a centreless bureaucracy is a situation that can speak to the depoliticisation of government. Maybe we can chat at the Courty but definitely more online – love to see some of your stuff too.
@Andrew Tone is difficult and as you say it’s an important matter. It’s difficult to make accurate judgments over longer periods, not least because manners change so you don’t have a common measure. BUT I guess some people I talked to are telling me that the tone has changed markedly in a very short period, and particularly since 2010. It would also appear that it changes markedly between issues. I’ll have more to say about this but some issues appear to draw forth a particularly ugly sort of sentiment that people find it hard to read. I definitely think you’re right that the cost of expressing oneself publicly has come down, and maybe people are choosing to comment online where they might have once yelled at the cat or whatever. But I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game – I think there’s an overall additive effect – but thanks, you’ve made me think about how I need to express all that and argue it quite carefully.
@Nick totally. Incivility is a “strategic asset” according to Herbst but so is the accusation of incivility – it’s a way of keeping people out of political debate and a way of shutting certain forums down. (I wonder if there’s a way of describing, though, the quality of a comment that would be upsetting to any reasonably sensitive person, because people have to read some pretty ugly things that are given an ugly expression). Anyway but yes, at greater length, you’re right – I would go much further into issues around who gets to make (and this is sounding Rancierean) the aesthetic judgements about incivility, what’s acceptable and what isn’t etc. I think the argument I’ll end up making here is quite inclusive as to forms of political speech, but is just saying that we need to design things better so that people don’t burn out in these jobs.
Thanks all!
Thinking about Norbert Elias and the civilizing process, it was a long term, top-down (class), bottom-up (feminism) process of cultural change. And what Nick Caldwell said.
Having said that, I’m still seeing it from a ritual point of view, same as the 2007 election and the Newspoll ritual, only on an almost daily basis. Something something a struggle over what will replace Couldry’s media rituals something something.
I have problems with starting from the assumption that political incivility works in a trickle down kind of way. Sure, you’re talking about responses to the actions of politicians, media, but those respondents are working with a bunch of assumptions of their own, starting with the belief that it is possible to challenge.
Will your work outlast the Gillard/Abbot bit of history?
Hi Lyn – long time no see. When you say “trickle-down” I don’t really follow, to be honest. I would have thought my assumption was the opposite. I suspect it will be more durable than Abbott/Gillard because (a) it’s bigger than Australia – unless you think that Gillard, Cameron and Obama are jointly exceptional (b) the drivers of this go beyond our current context.
Hi Jason. Reading through your abstract again, I’m still stuck on “contentious times” in the final par. I could be nit picking, but for me it reset the frame from consensus mentioned earlier to the current environment of political hostility and the notion that the incivility in political theatre is infecting the public.
A quick thought, before I read your post properly – thought you might appreciate this post from Amy Gray, ‘The Outrage Times’